Perhaps I sounded sharp. Julian’s face was immobile for a long moment. Then his expression changed yet again.
Incredibly, he smiled. He looked, for a moment, years younger. “Adam, Adam… I would be more insulted if you bowed than if you didn’t. You’re right, and I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“No offense given or taken, in that case.”
“I’m tired, and I’m tired of quarreling.”
“You ought to go to bed, then.”
“No—it wouldn’t work. It’s been days since I was able to sleep. But at least we can put Colorado Springs out of our minds. Would you like to see something unusual, Adam? Something from the days of the Secular Ancients?”
“I suppose so… if you want to show it to me.”
If anything had lately alarmed me about Julian’s behavior it was the way his moods and whims darted about as unpredictably as minnows in a fish-pool. The tendency had first become obvious when he was producing The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin.
He would appear on the set unannounced, and stalk around like an Oriental tyrant, demanding petty changes to the scenery or harassing the actors. Then the intemperance would pass from his mind as quickly as a cloud shadow crosses a prairie meadow, and he would smile sheepishly and offer apologies and praise. “Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”
I wished he wouldn’t wear the crown at all; for it plagued him, and made him imperious, and confused his mind.
He came down from his high chair and put his arm across my shoulder. “A fresh discovery from the Dominion Archives. Do you remember when I told you there were ancient Movies hidden there?”
“Yes—but not in any form we could see, you said.”
“And I said I would assign a Technician to work on the problem. Well, there’s been some success in the project. Come downstairs, Adam, and I’ll a show you a Movie that hasn’t been seen for two hundred years—part of one, at least.”
It turned out Julian had established a Cinema Room in the lower section of the Palace, useful for work on Darwin as well as the restoration of ancient moving pictures. I didn’t like to go into the basement of the Palace, as a rule, for it was a cold place even in warm weather, and I had heard of the prison cells and interrogation chambers located there. But the Cinema Room was a new installation, wholly modern and tolerably warm. Unusual machines and chemical baths had been installed there, along with a pristine white Movie Screen at one end and an elaborate Mechanical Projector at the other.
“Most of the films we found were crudely stored and eroded beyond repair,” said Julian. “Even the best of them were only partially recoverable, but what a treasure nonetheless,” and I heard in his voice an echo of the Julian Comstock who had pawed through books in the Tip outside Williams Ford with just such rapt fascination. “Lately I like to come down here at night, when it’s still and quiet, and watch these fragments. Here,” he said, picking up a can the size of a pie-plate, “this is a film called On the Beach, from the twentieth century—about half an hour of it. The original was longer, of course, and had recorded sound and such refinements.”
I took a chair as he threaded the ancient Movie, which had been copied onto modern celluloid, into the projecting machine. Midnight had come and gone, and Calyxa would be expecting me home, but I sensed that Julian needed my company just now; and I was afraid that if I left him he might fall into a deeper funk, or declare yet another war. “What’s it about?”
The projector, driven by the Palace’s unsleeping electrical generators, hummed and clattered to life. “Boats and things. You’ll see.” He dimmed the lights.
I confess that I didn’t understand most of what played out on the screen before me. It was riddled with gaps and lacunae. Many of the scenes were terribly faded, almost ghostly. Our inability to reproduce recorded sound interfered with the intelligibility of the film, since much of it consisted of people talking to one another. But there were many striking and unusual things in it.
There was an Underwater Boat, for instance, which Julian said was called a Submarine Boat. The interior of it looked like the engine room of a modern steamer, but more complex, decorated with countless clocks, levers, pipes, buttons, blinking lights, etc.; and the ship’s crew wore uniforms that were perpetually clean and starched.
But only a few of the scenes were nautical. Some took place in a city of the Secular Ancients. There were automobiles in the streets, at least in the earlier portion of the film, though not as many as I might have expected, and then none at all. The people of the city behaved in ways that suggested great wealth but even greater eccentricity.
There was also, as the title suggested, a beach scene, in which men and women socialized in clothing so abbreviated as to approach blatant nudity. A glimpse of this, I thought to myself, would have confirmed Deacon Hollingshead in all his prejudices about our ancestors.
Inexplicable events happened. There was an automobile race, with casualties. The city was evacuated, and a newspaper blew down an empty street. [I asked Julian whether this was about the False Tribulation, but Julian said no; On the Beach had been produced nearly a century before the End of Oil. The events it dramatized must have been purely local in nature, or purely imaginary.]
Julian paid close attention to the fragmentary film, though he had watched it many times before; but it seemed very sad and elegiac to me, and I wondered if Julian’s repeated viewing of it had not further depressed his mood.
It ended abruptly. Julian shook his head like a man recovering from a trance, and stopped the projector and turned up the lights. “Well?”
“I don’t know what to say, Julian. I wish there had been more scenes of that underwater boat in operation. I suppose it’s a good movie. I’m surprised the people in it seemed so unhappy, though, since they lived in a world full of automobiles and submarine boats.”
“It’s a drama—people in dramas are seldom happy.”
“It didn’t end with a wedding, or any uplifting thing such as that.”
“Well, it’s incomplete. We don’t know what the whole of it was like.”
“Certainly it’s a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don’t seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.”
“I don’t deny that they were imperfect,” Julian said in a distant voice. “I’m not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them.”
“What sin is that?”
“They evolved into us,” he said.
* * *
Clearly it was past time for me to go home. The sun would be up before very many more hours passed. I told Julian he ought to try to sleep, and see if the Presidency wasn’t more tolerable to a rested mind.
“I will,” he said, unconvincingly. “But before you go, Adam, I want to ask a favor of you.”
“Anything, if I’m able to grant it.”
“My mother has been making plans for all of us to leave the country. I’ve told her repeatedly we won’t be forced into such a drastic retreat. But I may be wrong. It’s true that I’ve made enemies. I’ve gambled with History, and I can’t guarantee the result. Adam, do you see those three film canisters on the table by the door?”
“Hard to miss them. What are they, some fresh discovery from the Archives?”
“No. That’s The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin.
All three acts, a master print of it, plus the performance script. Perhaps it’s childish, but I don’t like to think of it being permanently destroyed. If the political situation gets worse, or if anything unpleasant happens to me, I want you to take Darwin out of the country with you.”